Under Massachusetts' new healthcare cost-control law, legislators are counting on physician assistants like Tuff as critical partners in the effort to curb medical spending, improve the coordination of treatment, and give patients easier access to basic care amid a shortage of primary care doctors. A little-known provision of the law, which Governor Deval Patrick signed in August, expands the role of physician assistants by requiring health plans to list them as primary care providers in directories and allow patients to choose a physician assistant as their provider. They still will work on teams with doctors, but they will have their own group of patients for whom they are primarily responsible. Nurse practitioners were given similar status in a 2008 state law.
A group of Filipino nurses who claimed they were mocked for their accents and ordered to speak "English only" won a nearly $1-million settlement against a Central California hospital where bosses and co-workers were allegedly urged to eavesdrop on the immigrant workers. The $975,000 settlement, announced Monday by lawyers from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is believed to be the largest language discrimination settlement in the U.S. healthcare industry, according to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. Officials at Delano Regional Medical Center insisted they did nothing wrong and settled the lawsuit only because it made financial sense.
The union representing nurses at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center (EHMC) charge that the facility's decision to lay off nurses is "shortsighted" and runs counter to a hiring trend at other New Jersey hospitals. It's unclear how many positions will be affected, although earlier reports put the number at 70. Jean Otersen, policy director for the Health Professional and Allied Employees Union (HPAE) based in Emerson, said that the layoffs are scheduled to take effect around September 26. HPEA claims that Englewood has had a relatively solid profit margin and says that the layoffs are not justified and will affect patient care. She adds, some of Englewood's short-term financial concerns have to do with their investment in physician practices.
The study "Nurses Working Outside of Nursing: Societal Trend or Workplace Crisis?" undertaken after a survey of registered nurses published in 2009 said more than 4 percent of 35,635 RNs from all 50 states and the District of Columbia did not work in the profession and more than 12 percent did not work at all. Nearly 45 percent of nurses who did not work were retired and more than 38 percent did not work because they had family obligations. More than 120,000 nurses now work outside the profession. They have become product developers, consultants, auditors, trainers, teachers, risk managers, authors, forensics specialists, publishers and a host of other things. Now nurses are entrepreneurs as well as healthcare professionals.
At 350 pages, the state's new health cost control law contains multitudes. We'll surely be focusing on a wide range of the law's elements, but here's one called to our attention today by the Massachusetts Nurses Association: The bill that Gov. Patrick signed into law today bans mandatory overtime for nurses. In short, mandatory overtime is out as a means of dealing with a nursing crunch. But those crunches are expected to grow. Word also arrived today from the Massachusetts Hospital Association that the nurse vacancy rate has been rising, and in the coming years, a shortage is predicted.
Over the next few years, the Affordable Care Act will probably boost demand for nurses to take care of the newly insured, she says, "and I need faculty to teach the practitioners that are going to take care of these uninsured." In the last year, more than 76,000 qualified applicants were turned away, in large part because nursing schools didn't have enough professors. Polly Bednash, executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, says nurses comprise the oldest workforce in the nation, and many of them kept working during the recession. Finding professors to teach new nurses will be difficult because faculty members usually need a Ph.D.